[1][2] She was one of ten children of Agnes Telford and her husband, Robert Drummond, a teacher; the journal editor Norah Burnard was her older sister.
[4] After university she travelled to the United Kingdom, where she worked as a freelance journalist for the BBC, including narrating a television series about three generations of a New Zealand family.
[9] They moved back to New Zealand after the end of the war,[4][7][8] with Manson recording a programme for Wellington radio about her impressions on her return.
In 1967 Cecil and Celia visited the Villa Isola Bella where Mansfield wrote some of her best-known short stories, and discovered that a room on the lower level where she worked was derelict and not in use.
Their vision was "to give a selected New Zealand writer a period of leisure to write or study ... [in] a different and more ancient culture, and thereby to see [their] own remote country in a better perspective".